NAPOLEON INVADES, THE LAKES, RARE TREES, AND THE PROBLEMS OF FARMERS' DAUGHTERS

This is a draft post I made in 2021 which I hadn't published on my website although I had in other media. Seems a shame to waste it so here it is.

I travelled up to the Lakes last week and met up with my brother to pay homage to a five acre parcel of land in the South Lakes my late dad purchased in the seventies. It’s a piece of paradise.

But let’s begin with an entertaining conversation I overheard on the way back. I’m all for a bit of travel eavesdropping on trains, especially when it’s accidental and the people chatting coerce you, in a manner of speaking, to listen.

I got the train back to Manchester from Oxenholme. I wasn’t the only passenger boarding. Two young women in their early twenties, boarded as well and sat on the table across the aisle from mine. Their volume control was broken and stuck on ten.

​Initially I was thinking why aren’t you both staring silently and raptly at your phones like everyone normal at your age. Yet the conversation started to drag me in, complete with the girls’ lovely Westmorland accents, that odd combination of north Lancashire, Yorkshire and Geordie.

Here’s part of the conversation.

K: Do you think people can tell we’re farmers?
D: Farmer’s daughters you mean?
K: (laughing): It’s not like we smell of barns.
D: (laughing): Not usually.
K: Well, why do meet so few interesting lads?
D: Interesting people, you mean?
K: It’s the friends’ group. It’s too small. We all end up going with each other. Then it’s embarrassing.
D: I know. I broke out once remember. For a bit. I had that thing with that lad in Skipton. Another farmer of course and dead good-looking but thick and ate awfully. Chomp, chomp. It was disgusting. Like a pig.
K: And can you remember that one I went with up at Kirkby Stephen for a couple of months.
D (laughing): Yeah, he really did smell like manure.

That made me laugh too, but I gave up, as the volume became too much, and put my headphones on and watched Morecambe Bay pass by to music. There were glimpses of the sands and over them the Lake District mountains appeared, Old Man Coniston prominent and then the last outlier, the dark humped bulk of Black Combe. It’s curious how the Lake District is so-called given it has so many mountains. Did ‘the Mountain District’ ever look likely to stick? Lakes are more distinctive I suppose. The Lake District is better, describes a characteristic.

Then we crossed the River Lune north of Lancaster. The tide was out and it occurred to me, as a non-sequitur, that rail travel is far more like floating than flight. Flight is a pointless bouncy castle of an experience compared to rail travel, usually conducted in a fog of cloud. The train, tied by gravity to the earth, flies smoothly through landscapes, with just enough fluctuations of movement, bumps for want of a better word, to show we still have the soil under our rails. It’s fast enough to get to places quickly, slow enough to watch the landscape change, yet close enough to almost feel it.

The next major river, the chatty girls and I crossed, was the Ribble. Ah lovely Ribble, a noble river, that starts in the Dales and flows into the Irish Sea fresh as daisy from its ramble through the north west of England.
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I wondered at geography and geology lately on a walk up Pen-y-ghent mountain in the Dales where we'd found rare purple saxifrage flowering close to the summit almost artfully sited next to some residual snow. On one side of that very good-looking Pennine peak the waters all flow east into the North Sea and on the other side they flow west into the Irish Sea.

One of those ‘waters’ is the River Ribble. I don’t know why the watershed there creates wonder in me but it does. It seems significant in intuitive ways. Something to do with how the planet moves, how gravity falls, how nature behaves, how brief it makes our lives appear when compared to a geological timescale. I find nothing melancholy in that thought, on the contrary it’s reassuring.

Anyway, as stated, the purpose of the visit to the Lakes was to stroll a parcel of land the family call with great cunning ‘the Land’. We do this on the anniversary of my late mum’s birthday. There are three pasture meadows with extreme height differences in the terrain, turned into a sanctuary for flora and fauna by my dad’s monomania with trees. Much remains grassed of course, often sprinkled with cowslips, but the list of rare trees and shrubs impresses anybody interested in such matters.

​The views are superb, north up the A6 to the dramatic ridge of Whinfell and south over Kendal, seven miles away, then into Lancashire. To the south east, at night and three miles distant, the west coast mainline trains and their lit compartments appear as snakes, bodies sparkling with bright light, winding over the shoulder of Benson Knott.

After ‘the Land’ we went to Bowness for a drink and a meal in the sunny April chill. My brother Robert likes to discover rare books in charity shops so we had to stop off in one of those. There was nothing for him but I found Napoleon Bonaparte.

Or to give him his full name and title: ‘Napoleon Bonaparte, by the Grace of God and the Constitutions of the Republic, Emperor of the French, King of Italy, Protector of the Confederation of the Rhine, Mediator of the Swiss Confederation’. Old Boney (as he was known over here) seemed a bit confused back then. Can you be an emperor through the constitution of a republic?

My Boney is about a foot high and ceramic. I knew he was small but not that small. He was priced £3 and is totally rubbish but it amused me to buy him and then we posed him all across Bowness, next to swans, on grassy mounds, on the lunch table.

The following day we went to Shap Abbey, which is perfectly hidden in a fold of the hills between the Lakes and the Pennines. It is a noble ruin with the principal feature the west tower. We posed old Bonaparte there too. Nobody was about, until as we left, over a footbridge, we passed a couple in their thirties with matching rambling poles. They did that tiresome Covid-shimmy to one side as though we had bubos popping out of our cheekbones, even though we were in miles of open country.

Best thing was as they retreated we heard one of them say, “That’s odd. Do you think Napoleon had something to do with Shap Abbey?” It’s the sort of thing that creates a rumour that turns into a myth that becomes a fact. So, when you hear somebody say that Napoleon made a secret visit to England and stayed at Shap Abbey you’ll know it started with a daft man who bought a tacky ceramic statuette from a charity shop as a laugh.

When I got back to the flat my subscription of ‘History Today’ was in the letter box. One of my sons bought me this subscription as a Christmas present. The main story was called: ‘Napoleon, Life after Death’, and there was Boney with exactly the same coat as my statuette on the cover.

​I love a good coincidence, which was compounded when on a walk across town to the excellent Ducie Street Warehouse for a meal I discovered there’s a new casino, bar and restaurant, opening on Portland Street called Napoleon’s - although by then I was beginning to worry something sinister was afoot.